


To Make Smooth

by Katherine



Category: Earth's Children - Jean M. Auel
Genre: Caves, F/M, Grooming, Hair Washing, The Valley of Horses, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-13 03:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16885173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: Jondalar had a restlessness to him as winter neared, but he acquiesced to Ayla's preference. She was not eager to take even a short Journey from the familiarity of her valley. He could wait to resume his journeying, to introduce Ayla to other people. They had provided well for themselves, with Ayla's expertise, and could winter comfortably in the cave.





	To Make Smooth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OzQueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OzQueen/gifts).



> This is set past the end of _The Valley of Horses,_ and diverges from canon in that Ayla and Jondalar did not (yet) take the short Journey that led to them encountering the Mamutoi.

Jondalar had a restlessness to him as winter neared, but he acquiesced to Ayla's preference. She was not eager to take even a short Journey from the familiarity of her valley. He could wait to resume his journeying, to introduce Ayla to other people. They had provided well for themselves, with Ayla's expertise, and could winter comfortably in the cave along with the two horses.

That winter started gently, with light, picturesque snowfalls. Ayla felt a deep enjoyment riding double on Whinney as the weather changed. That she was no longer alone, that this winter—always the hardest, loneliest season since she left the Clan—would be with the company of another person, not only an animal friend. Not any person, but this man of the Others, the first she knew. This man she had come to care for deeply and know her regard returned.

Ayla and Jondalar were to come to know each other better, over that winter season alone, than they might have done if they had been in contact with other people, or living within a community. They had lived closely together already, but that had been once Ayla first found him. In that time while Jondalar was healing and grieving his brother Thonolan.

Before they could speak fluently to one another, when Jondalar had been confined to the cave by his injury not by his will. This time was altogether different as they came to trust one another further, having made the decision to winter together. 

*

One crisply cool night when the sky was clear they carried heavy hides out to the ledge. The hides were luxuriously soft, as all that Ayla had prepared from her kills, as the two people settled close against each other. As they gazed at the bright stars. Ayla joined tales of Clan spirits at their celestial hearths to Jondalar's chanted myths from his own faraway people.

A horse's wicker of greeting broke in. Ayla reached back to stroke Whinney's nose, laughing. "We'll go back in now to you and your baby," she said. The statement was partially in Clan gestures, but Jondalar was coming to understand a little of the woman's mixed language that she communicated with her horses.

Back inside the cave, Jondalar unbanked the fire while Ayla returned the hides they had been sitting on to storage, then arranged their shared bedding. That looked particularly cosy under the comforting flicker of firelight.

"If we didn't have your firestones, we might lose the fire," Jondalar said. Ayla was better each day with the individual quirks to his expressions and the tone of his language. (His language indeed, for the most part they spoke Zelandonii, although she kept up her learning of the Mamutoi language from him, and was starting to consider adding the words used by whichever people were the nearest.) Now Ayla could see that he was winding into some joke.

"It would be cold here in a cave, and we would have to huddle for warmth," Jondalar said. A small joke, but he began to laugh at his own words, and Ayla joined in. They needed no excuse of temperature to lie close together each night, sharing the heat of their bodies and so often the Pleasures that she had come to experience with him.

*

As luck would have it, nature sent a snowstorm later in the season that did indeed close them together in the cave for a time. There was no danger, Ayla's storage having been topped up with Jondalar's help in the autumn. With the understanding that had grown between them, the two people found it was no hardship to be constantly in one another's company. Yet there were other discomforts.

Ayla's scalp started to itch, faint but persistently, as her hair got lank, then when she scratched the base of her braids there were tiny white flecks. Intolerable, for someone so fastidious. But even thinking of the effort necessary to wash her hair in winter was exhausting. She was still thinking of how she had lived here in the valley with only her own efforts. Alone, in past years, she had to take all the time to gather enough snow, melt it to water and at least take the snow chill from the result if not warm it through.

She displaced her feelings by thoroughly grooming Whinney, which required only Ayla's own hands and a prickly dried plant from her stores.

"That horse of yours likes your grooming," Jondalar said as he stepped close to them, Racer nosing at Whinney's legs as if to join in the conversation.

"Grooming is touching?" Ayla checked. She balanced the dried teasel on Whinney's back, twitching her empty hands ready to communicate, for all that her conversations with this man of the Others were vocal, not in the largely silent Clan language.

"Touching to make clean, to make—smooth," Jondalar said, seeming to feel out the words aloud.

Ayla raised one of her hands to her own hair, so much longer than Whinney's and currently neither of those adjectives.

"I can gather snow and feed the fire to melt it," Jondalar told her. His assertion had a hint of indignation in it; this much time since his injury, and he remained determined to be useful. It was more surprising to Ayla that he had sensed her unease and offered a solution to it. After growing up with the Clan, each person having their established tasks segregated by sex, then the repeated seasons with no other person in her valley, Ayla was unused to such help being offered. Jondalar kept giving that to her, the gift of not only helping but putting his mind to how to help.

*

With more than one pair of hands collecting up snow and readying it to melt on the fire, there was soon enough water ready to wash the full length of Ayla's hair. She rinsed her body all over first. The cleansing function from her selected stored plants was not nearly as strong as freshly picked soaproot, but it was its own luxury combined with the fire-warmed water.

While she washed her hair, Jondalar was an unobtrusive help. He cleaned himself as well, after. He did not take a long time of it, and Ayla's hair had hardly begun to dry when he was done. Jondalar's clean, damp hands touched the wet fall of it over her bare shoulders.

"In the Clan, Iza—my mother—" Ayla said suddenly, with the simmering defiance any time she mentioned her life among those Jondalar had first dismissed as "flatheads". The Clan had been her people.

Jondalar, ashamed anew of his prejudiced reaction, made an encouraging sound. He watched curiously as Ayla reached for where she kept her tally-sticks and some other pieces of wood. What she handed to him was a single long stick, smooth, one end of it tapered to a point. Not a spear. It was far thinner than those he was accustomed to, let alone than the heavy fire-hardened spears which Ayla had made alone.

"To make hair smooth," Ayla said, putting it through two locks of her hair in illustration. Grooming herself, she thought, and smiled, amused at the impractical idea of smoothing her hair with a dried teasel the way she groomed Whinney's similarly-coloured shaggy coat.

The stick was like a comb, Jondalar realised, but a less complicated tool. It was parallel to what his way of working flint was in comparison to her Clan's way.

Ayla's drying hair was white-gleaming in the firelight, rippled from the braids she had arranged her hair in before. He wanted to touch her hair—touch all of her, forget the snow outside in the joy of sharing Pleasures with her—but he would settle for this. Jondalar set himself to combing Ayla's hair in the way she was familiar with, from her strange, adopted childhood. Another kind of sharing, and another way for them to more closely understand each other.


End file.
